Jean Kazez is hosting a philosophy “blog-carnival” (i.e., a collection of posts) focusing on philosophy and animals. Lots of interesting-looking entries (most of which, alas, I haven’t had time to dig into).
Month: February 2010
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Health care reform can still pass
So argues Jonathan Chait. Seems persuasive to me, but what do I know?
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Tilting at locavorist windmills
This NYT article scores some easy points against a rigorous or simplistic locavorism (e.g., there are areas of the country where pickings are pretty slim this time of year), but skims along at what turns out to be a pretty superficial level.
“Food miles” is just one consideration when it comes to eating sustainably, and quite possibly not the most important one. Method of production is probably just as, if not more, important. Also, the article conflates proximity with size, implying that “eating locally” means that everyone grows their own food in their backyard or rooftop garden. The concept of what counts as local is a good bit more complicated than that.
Clearly people often have to make trade-offs (e.g., local vs. organic), and there’s no single rule to follow here. All the more reason why we need to address these issues at a more systemic level. For instance, it’s not practical for people to calculate the carbon footprint of their food with any great precision; that’s why we need to put a price on CO2 emissions–whether through cap-and-trade or a carbon tax or some similar mechanism–so that the carbon footprint, from production through transport and sale, is built into the price of food.
UPDATE: My post skirts over a very important issue: many–maybe even most–people scarcely have the luxury of wondering whether to buy local, organic, or any other kind of food other than the cheapest. Clearly any reform of our food system has to focus on making food healthy, tasty, sustainable, and affordable.
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Fallows on American declinism
I just yesterday got around to reading the big Atlantic cover story. Well worth your time–Fallows seems to be buddies with just about every interesting public intellectual in the country and canvasses a wide range of views on what ails us. His overall narrative (American culture–in better shape than you thought; American politics–not so much) is pretty persuasive.
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Factory Planet
I’m both sympathetic to and skeptical of the ethos on display at Front Porch Republic. On the one hand, an ethics of limits is precisely one of the things we desperately need. On the other, FPRers evince a sometimes-disturbing nostalgia for an agrarian arcadia that never was and to which we wouldn’t want to return even if we could. They paradoxically pair it with a quasi-anarchic distrust of government that would only further the destruction of the local community life FPRers prize if it had its way.
That said, this essay clearly and convincingly lays out some of the major problems with our faith in limitless economic growth and the implications for both the well-being of the biosphere and the survival of human liberty.
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Teleology beyond biologism
One addendum to the previous post. I noted that old-style “biological” teleology had largely fallen out of favor as a foundation for ethics. However, this doesn’t mean that Christian ethics can or should dispense with teleology altogether. I grazed this point when I said that “ultimate happiness consists in greater knowledge of and union with God or the Good…and this fulfillment only comes to complete fruition in the life to come.” Our telos, in Christian terms, is an eschatological one and is not given “immanently” in the created order. The same could be said of other creatures: if they are to share in the life of the world to come, then their proper end is a transcendent one too.
This doesn’t mean that biology is irrelevant to understanding the goods proper to the lives of individual creatures. However, from a Christian perspective, the “natural order” doesn’t fully reflect God’s intention for his creatures. This is expressed in the traditional language of creation being “fallen,” which still has some salience, even if we reject the notion of a historical fall. Creation is, Christians believe, on the way to being transformed. The Risen Christ as the “first fruits” of the new creation provides us with a picture of our genuine end. This can and should inform Christian ethical thinking.
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Creaturely goods and theistic ethics
In comments to this post, Gaius asked some incisive questions about how a theist who accepts the general evolutionary picture of the world can avoid falling back on some form of divine command theory (also known as theological voluntarism).
The problem arises because, post-Darwin, it’s difficult to attribute inherent purposive-ness to natural processes. But the old natural law ethics, which has probably been the chief alternative to divine command ethics in Christian history, rested on a teleological view of nature that no longer seems tenable: the good life consisted in realizing one’s essential nature.
Maybe it’s my Platonistic inclinations, but I’ve never been particularly happy with this choice. I think a full understanding of value will inevitably make reference to the divine, but I don’t think moral rules are simply the arbitrary dictates of God. They are, I believe, rooted in the nature of things, but not properly accounted for by the “biologism” of some versions of natural law.
My general view is that each individual creature is an expression of (or resembles, or participates in) the divine. The Catholic theologian Denis Edwards, following St. Bonaventure, puts it like this:
In the life of the Trinity, everything flows from the fecundity of the Source of All, whom Bonaventure calls the Fountain Fullness (fontalis plenitude). He sees the eternal Word of Wisdom of God as the Exemplar, the image of Fountain Fullness. When God freely chooses to create, the fruitfulness of Trinitarian life finds wonderful expression in the diversity of creatures. Each different kind of creature is a reflection and image of the eternal Word. (Denis Edwards, Ecology at the Heart of Faith, p. 71)
Creation, we can say, is a form of God’s self-expression. Thus, each creature, because it reflects the divine, has inherent value. Further, at least some of these creatures—human beings and many other animals—have an experiential welfare, or, to put it another way, their lives can go better or worse for them. And because these creatures have inherent value (being a reflection of the divine), their well-being matters, not just from their own point of view, but from a universal, or impartial, point of view.
It’s clearly a matter of controversy what constitutes a good human life—that is, what it means for a human life to go better or worse for the one living it. But there do seem to be some universals. Pleasure, happiness, knowledge, freedom, and companionship seem to be among the goods universally prized by human beings. Likewise, all humans seek, other things being equal, to avoid pain, suffering, frustration, ignorance, bondage, and enmity. (A modified, though not wholly dissimilar, list could be provided for other animals.)
So, it’s not merely a matter of God’s preference or whim that, say, happiness is preferable to misery. This is a fact rooted in the constitution of the world (which, of course, theists believe is ultimately traceable back to God). And for Christians at least, ultimate happiness consists in greater knowledge of and union with God or the Good. Nothing less will truly satisfy us (and this fulfillment only comes to complete fruition in the life to come).
While this general picture makes reference to the nature of things, note that we’re not talking about “reading value off of biological processes” here. Clearly the kinds of goods that contribute to a human animal’s well-being are rooted in our biology, but biological processes as such don’t have the same status in this account as they do in some versions of natural law ethics. To take an obvious example, most of us no longer regard it as wrong per se to interfere with the process by which intercourse (sometimes) leads to conception. We need an independent moral criterion to decide when that may or may not be a good idea. And this will involve reference to the kinds of goods that make for a well-lived human life.
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The end of the affair
The flirtation between liberals and libertarians that arose out of shared anti-Bush animus is over, according to Ed Kilgore. The causes are an economically interventionist Democratic administration and the rightward pull exerted on libertarians by Tea Partyism.
Not to mention, this Jonathan Chait piece that Kilgore links to seems like the definitive refutation of “liberaltarianism” as a political philosophy. (No ideology with a name that ugly deserves to live anyway.)
A Thinking Reed 